This story begins with my sister — not the version of her people saw in school photos or family gatherings, but the version shaped by a mind that was constantly at war with itself. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. Suicidal thoughts that came and went like storms no one could predict. We grew up in the 80s, a decade everyone remembers as bright and loud and full of innocence. Back then, life felt simple. Music was better, movies were better, and childhood felt like a place you could hide from anything. But innocence has an expiration date, and mine ran out long before I understood what was happening. My sister was thirteen or fourteen when the shift began. At first, it was small — a change in her tone, a look in her eyes that didn’t match the moment. Then it grew darker. Faster. More chaotic. In the late 80s, mental health wasn’t something families talked about. It was something they hid. Something they feared. Something they hoped would just go away if they didn’t say its name out loud.
My parents tried everything they could think of. Medication. Hospital stays. Facilities that promised help but felt more like holding cells. Even shock treatments — the kind of thing you only hear about in movies and assume doesn’t happen anymore. They were desperate, terrified, and completely unprepared for the storm that had taken root inside their daughter. You’ll get to know her as I keep writing — the girl she was before the darkness, and the person she became as it tightened its grip. You’ll learn about my parents too, and the impossible choices they had to make while trying to hold a family together with their bare hands. But they also were guilty of taking my innocence.
I’m not a writer. I’m just someone who lived through it and spent years trying to understand the damage it left behind. What happened in her room that first time — the moment everything shifted — became a shadow that followed me for decades. It shaped me in ways I didn’t understand until much later.
I was lucky to find a wife who helped me untangle the knots, who helped me breathe again. But the beginning of it — the moment the bright 80s cracked open and something darker spilled out — that’s where the story truly begins.
It started with things that didn’t make sense — little moments that felt wrong in a way I didn’t yet have words for. Back then, I didn’t understand boundaries or danger. I only understood that sometimes the world felt strange, like the rules had quietly changed when I wasn’t looking. The night it happened, the house felt too quiet. The kind of quiet that presses against your ears. I remember the hallway light spilling into her room, the shadows stretching long across the carpet. I remember feeling small, like I’d wandered into a place I wasn’t supposed to be.She acted like everything was normal. Like this was just another game. And I was a kid — kids believe what they’re told. Kids want to be good. Kids want to be liked. But then something shifted. The air changed. My stomach dropped in a way I didn’t understand but my body did.
Fear arrived before understanding. I remember the moment I tried to get away — the panic, the instinct, the sudden certainty that something was terribly wrong. I remember scrambling off the bed, my heart pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape too and then her voice. Calm. Cold. Final.
“Nobody is coming for you.”
Those words didn’t just scare me. They carved themselves into me.
The room felt darker after that. The house felt darker. The world felt darker.
And even now, years later, that sentence still echoes — not because of what happened, but because of what it meant: that the person who should have protected me chose to become the thing I needed protection from. I was just molested for the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last time this would happen, who did she learn this from…. Hint it was my mom.
Funk & The Flipside 